Episode 1- From Accountant to Speech Pathologist as a person who Stutters by Stuttering DeMystified and Beyond

Lori: Hello and welcome to Stuttering Demystified hosted by Lori Melnitsky. I'm a speech language pathologist. I'm a stuttering specialist. I'm an ADHD life coach and most importantly, I am a person who stutters and who used to stutter very severely. And I am so excited. This is episode 1 and I wanted to talk to you. What this episode is about is, how I became a speech language pathologist. And I think it's a message really more than that. Not so much that I was an accountant and became a speech language pathologist. It's a message about hope. It's a message about perseverance and believing in oneself.

So, I really hope this helps you. It actually helps me because I have to rehash it or I want to and I think it will help all of us really move forward in life and inspire you or I'm hoping so. So, I'm just going to tell you that I started stuttering at the age of 4 and it ran in my family because my because my father stuttered also. And at a young age, I was aware I was different. I spoke differently. I couldn't say my name and I also had curly hair that I always wanted to have straight hair. So, at a young age, I felt like I was different than everybody else. And in elementary school, I was aware that I couldn't raise my hand to ask for the hall pass to go to the ladies’ room, and when they went around the room to ask people to read out loud. The anxiety inside of me rose, because I did not want to be found out as a person who stutters, so I did everything I possibly could. I hid in the back of the room. I chose a seat in the back of the room. I would put my hair, my curly hair in front of my face and really, I wanted to disappear. Because what if I was found out and what if people started laughing at me, and what if they didn't want to be friends with me.

So that was really hard, but I was very fortunate in the sense that I had a supportive family. I have a brother who's 4 years younger than me. So, my parents and my brother were very, very supportive and they never really treated me as someone different or someone who stutters. Fast forward to really by the time I got to be maybe almost 12 or 13, my father owned, with his brother my father owns a pharmacy, which in some ways I think just taught me things to really overcome so much in life. It was probably one of the most important jobs at a young age that I ever had. And even though I stuttered, there wasn't that much help honestly for stuttering at that time or that much knowledge about it. I did get a little help in middle school, but I did arts, honestly arts and crafts projects most of the time and I didn't know how that was helping me.

There's one instance that I remember that my mother had called the school and said, my daughter's really stuttering a lot. She's blocking on words and she's repeating words and she just can't get her message out. And they said, okay, we'll do an evaluation. I remember sitting in a music class trying to learn how to read music which was not going really well. And all of a sudden, I heard, ‘Lori Melminsky. Well, Lori Melnitsky, please report to the speech office for an evaluation.’ And I said, ‘I cannot believe they're announcing this.’ I'm going to like fall on the floor don't know what to do. The music teacher didn't know me by name, so I was like alright, I can make believe that I I'm like hiding. Like nobody will notice me. But my friends obviously knew me and said, you have to listen to the announcement.

So, I kind of put my coat over my head. I grabbed my books. Kind of like slid down the hallway against, I can even feel it almost against like the shiny tiles on the wall. Crawled into the speech room and I remember thinking I wanted to be invisible. There is hope. It changed and got better. www.allislandspeech.com